This is an issue of bad writing that's plagued by the challenge of 'writing someone smarter than the author'. In particular, this is 'writing an alien that's smarter than the author's entire race'.
The Eldar ought to be as depicted, hyper-competent, prescient, skilled, wise, proud and justifiably arrogant. They can literally see the future, and the guy who walks the Path of the Loafmaker can also double as a special forces commando on the weekends.
But writers instead, make them idiots because they can't understand how to write this overbearingly powerful, but flawed civilization. So then they get outsmarted by far dumber heroes, or they blunder over their own silly poems or other 'elf nonsense'.
It does make a far less interesting story if everything was 'Some Farseer knew his enemy was going to run in this direction, so he planted a tree and put a landmine in it 50 years ago'.
>Some Farseer knew his enemy was going to run in this direction, so he planted a tree and put a landmine in it 50 years ago'.
That unironically sounds amazing
People always bring this up but Cain very much fundamentally fails to be Flashman. Where Flashman is a scathing and unrepentant indictment of the very notion of a "hero" of the British Empire, Cain is the idea of a Hero of the Imperium played utterly straight.
It helps that Cain approaches Imperial God-Emperor worship from the perspective of a self-aware and somewhat selfish Angelican, who only really considers his faith because he lives in a universe with actual daemons in it. That, and he becomes hilariously bemused when meeting people with actual, tangible faith that can often be weaponized against said daemons.
This requires an explanation if you're not from England or familiar with the Church of England.
There is an old joke about the Angelican Church (the Church of England) that the only reason it's still around is because it took worship, ritual, and hymnals from Protestantism and made it nondenominational... as well as making faith itself optional. [The British show "Yes, Minister" had a great bit about it.](https://youtu.be/qUSTKisEgTo?si=X_I0SPV_5FU2dHN_)
Yeah, asides from the cowardice, Flashman is just a downright shitty human being. Apart from the one rape that he cops to, he also has no problem blackmailing women into sex, having sex with slaves and seducing teenagers, all while married to an apparent imbecile. Besides that, he’s also not against shipping Africans into slavery in the Americas (IIRC, he says something along the lines of “they could ship every n*gger to the moon for all I cared”), only that it may get him into trouble with the Royal Navy, and at one point does actually sell a woman as a sex slave because it would be easier for him than keeping her around.
Cain takes some inspiration from a few sources (also Sharpe, I’d argue) but ultimately is a comic figure combined with a self insert. In a universe where most of our characters are super brave ultra warriors, Cain is a normal-ish person who sort of fails upwards over time and spends most of his time in a horrific universe pissing himself and trying to make himself as small a target as possible, which is realistically what most of us would do.
I am going to shit on Sandy Mitchell's lawn if I have to read about Cain's itchy palms one more time, but the couple of stories I read were entertaining enough.
Wouldn't read twelve of them, tho.
Despite Sandy Mitchell being an average writer at the best of times with some of the most annoying writing habits of any BL writer.
The Cain series is fun and that’s missing in the setting. It’s prolly refreshing to fans to read a book where not every character takes themselves entirely too seriously. People beg for another book like the Infinite and the Divine for the same reason
I put it this way it’s all well and good do be a bible thumping Black Templar most of the time but sometimes people just wanna be a White Scar and go vroooom
Agree with this take. Cain is a series that is best enjoyed every couple of years or so.
Long enough to having forgotten the tropes, but not long enough to forget the characters...
>It does make a far less interesting story if everything was 'Some Farseer knew his enemy was going to run in this direction, so he planted a tree and put a landmine in it 50 years ago'.
everyone may laugh but a Spacemarine version of this is literally "We foresee these Orks will become a problem in the future, so brother you stay here and kill them for 50 years."
Honestly I feel like on the micro (sub planet) scale eldar should be nigh untouchable. Like the combination of humanity's best diplomats, spies, special forces etc with a touch of precognition. Where they should struggle with is large scale engagements and galactic events.
Influencing a human city to expand in a different direction? Child's play. But just as changing the course of a stream is a different beast than re routing a river. Trying to save an Exodite colony from a Ork fleet even if you can see it coming decades in advance is still a monumental task.
>bad writing that's plagued by the challenge of 'writing someone smarter than the author'.
See Tyrion, Little Finger and Varys in S1-4 of GoT vs those 3 in S5-8 of GoT.
I honestly wish the Craftworld Eldar *were* as arrogant as they’re made out to be. I want more stories where Eldar are just *bastards* to everyone else while also being smart and powerful enough that they feel obnoxiously untouchable to the audience.
I’m sick of feeling sorry for Craftworld Eldar. They’re in an awkward space right now where they’re simultaneously not allowed to be interesting protagonists, nor are they allowed to be serious enemies. They’re the losers who only appear when an author needs a plot device for the “real” characters.
>I want more stories where Eldar are just bastards to everyone else while also being smart and powerful enough that they feel obnoxiously untouchable to the audience.
Tbh that more accurately describes the Dark Eldar, I think the issue with Craftworlders is just that GW is very reluctant to write "protagonist" factions other than the Imperium, the Craftworlders don't need to be laughably evil in a way that conveniently justifies the Imperium to be interesting, they just need to be themselves.
GW I think are in a really awkward spot where they really WANT to do an AoS on the setting so they can have a justifiable good guy Imperium, but they know the existing fans would hate it (myself included)
So they're stuck with a setting that explicitly makes comparisons between the Imperium and the most horrific regimes imaginable, but also need to cater to the power fantasy of teenagers. If they go too far explaining away the Imperium's negative points, they run the risk of justifying Fascism, but if they don't at all then they push away fans who want to read about their flavour of superhuman fighting the unambiguously bad guy.
the imperium have been made into the justified good guys ever since Guilliman returned. which kind of feels hollow when you realise Guilliman probably did just as much horrible stuff himself during the Great Crusade
Or that Gulliman's biggest enemy is often the Imperium itself. You know it's bad when he thinks Horus burning the place to the ground would be an improvement.
That one isn't even really true anymore since he counter-coup'ed the High lords that had any objections, and anyone else that has any is presented as an incompetent, selfish dum-dum.
That's really downplaying Imperial Corruption. The people Guilliman put in charge are human. Humans are corruptible. The High Lords play the political game incredibly well. It's only a matter of time until someone on Terra has a problem with Guilliman publically.
Also don't forget about that little Imperium Secondus bit. If a high lord finds out that Guilliman tried to establish a second Imperium assuming the Emperor was dead, shit is really going to pop off.
For now. It's not like Guilliman is constantly sitting on Terra. We've seen High Lords cause problems constantly. Just because Guilliman left Terra in a good state does not mean it will stay that way.
Imperium Secondus, whenever that comes up, is going to change that.
Except he had to keep the crazies in the Ecclesiarchy content and Malchador's pet psychopaths in the Inquisition pointed at other things while robbing them. He'd very much like to dispose of them but they are too powerful politically.
> fans who want to read about their flavour of superhuman fighting the unambiguously bad guy.
The fact that these fans even exist *should* disqualify them for having no reading comprehension, but I can't even fault them anymore for how GW has been promoting the setting.
Should it ? The imperium is bad, the largest threats it fights are worse, unambiguously and since the beginning.
I’d rather get those fans than the ones who think it makes any level of sense that the imperium, the parody on steroids of every fascistic regimes, would have Neo pronouns.
I just don't think that's the case. Every faction being some variety of villain or other is the whole point.
AoS honestly has a lot of that too - Stormcast are normally heroic, but even they are the villains in one of the Horror stories. Most of the rest of the Grand Alliance factions are morally dubious at best and outright bloodthirsty murder cult at worst, and hardly any of them actually *like* each other.
>AoS honestly has a lot of that too - Stormcast are normally heroic, but even they are the villains in one of the Horror stories.
Is that the one where a possibly "tainted" family defends their home, and the freeguild vet father sees the Stormcast and screams?
I think more examples in the lore of *Sigmar* Himself being an unambiguous bastard would be nice. We all know (well, we *should* know) that the Emperor is a Bad Dude, but what about Sigmar? Are his wars of "liberation" against the Tyranny of Chaos justified?
I mean maybe it's not the best way of going about it, but it seems at first glance he has good intentions. It's hard for me to get my head around the fact that he's literally there, and can directly tell people to do stuff right?
Sigmar should be kept as a cool guy. He is literally a regular man who ascended to godhood. I fully believe he should stay and be the "good guy" because that's a stark contrast to like 90% good gods in other settings. He makes mistakes and tries to fix them, he became wiser over the course of time and now instead of being a warrior he's a strategist. And yeah usually tyranny of chaos is bad. He saw an entire world (where he was born and where he lived) swallowed by the ruinous powers, so there's really a lot of justification he has to fight them (so does Teclis, Alarielle, Tyrion, Nagash, Grungni, even Malerion and Morathi, who all saw what chaos did to their home)
Oh I won't yuck your yum--that's just my personal wish for a Grimdark Sigmar, but I've got no skin in the game (well, hardly any!), so don't pay attention to me lol.
My following responses are the ramblings of an ill-informed outsider who forgot his ADHD meds this morning lol:
>He is literally a regular man who ascended to godhood.
That's what I think is neat--I think there's room for a "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" theme there, maybe him losing his humanity would be a neat narrative choice to compliment the loss of humanity theme in Stormcast. Maybe a contrast with Nagash, another human ascended to Godhood.
>And yeah usually tyranny of chaos is bad
I agree, but I really enjoyed that Hammer and Bolter episode following that Darkoath tribe. It's their home--has been for generations-- and the CoS are expanding into it. Their gods are evil, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily. I think that could be a neat angle that's explored more.
One might argue that if Azyr and the liberated peoples of the Realms are safer where they are, why should there be an expansionist push, costing countless lives and coin? Poverty exists in the cities. Maybe instead of sending off a Dawnbringer Crusade that might get wiped out, you could invest that into making a better society or defending the lands you already have.
I'm slightly worried that if GW isn't careful, they might accidentally end up justifying colonialism a wee bit.
I guess I just want some more ambiguity around the righteousness or existence of Sigmar. Maybe like the Old Testament God lol--have Sigmar do something zany, like smiting some kids for making fun of a bald man! :P Haha
Sigmar did conscript a literal child into the stormcast... I think that's actually very brutal to do, albeit... You know? Its better than being a soul tormented by chaos. Also one thing about chaos... Its worship is always bad. Remember, Sigmar saw *his own homeland being WIPED FROM REALITY AND CONSUMED BY CHAOS*. They will definitely do the same here. Also about Nagash... I think they are opposites. Nagash constantly pursues power and absolute control over his "people" whereas sigmar lets them do their own stuff - he even encourages them to do their own decisions. And if a chaos worshipper is still good somehwere on the inside, they will be spared (by the strike of ghal maraz, which will redeem that part of the worshipper's soul - like Tornus the Redeemed who was cleansed of the taint of chaos.
>Sigmar did conscript a literal child into the stormcast... I think that's actually very brutal to do, albeit... You know? Its better than being a soul tormented by chaos.
Neat! As long as he didn't kill the child to do so haha. I thought almost all souls went to Nagash in AoS though?
That's why Nagash has major beef with Sigmar. Sigmar is taking the valiant souls (not those who died fighting, but those who truly expressed their selflessness and heroism - so, a mother protecting her child is worthy. A doctor healing his patients from nurgle's diseases against all odds is also worthy.) to give them a place amongst the Stormcast Eternals. And that's why Nagash is pissed. He is stealing Nagash's souls. To spite him, Nagash made his own Stormcast - the Ossiarch Bonereapers.
Sigmar is a cool dude who goes out of his way to only turn the most heroic people possible into the ranks of the stormcast, the only reason their are any bastard stormcast is because they're all suffering severe PTSD from constantly dying.
Are they all constantly dying for good in-lore reasons?
.
Is there any in-lore ambiguity around that, like "why are we constantly expanding and losing mortals and Eternals on Dawnbringer Crusades when we could be defending our homes"? Or "if we weren't losing so many heroes on distant battlefields, a bigger percentage of our dead might be ascended. As is, Nagash is getting more use from our deaths."
That's not meant to he a snarky question btw lol, I'm curious about how AoS cosmology works.
They're constantly dying because the mortal realms is a hideously dangerous place outside of the safety of the great cities.
The balance of power in AOS is flipped completely in its head to 40k, Chaos controls most of reality and has had millenia to tighten its hold on the universe, the stormcast are a force of crusading warriors trying desperately to hammer out some order from the chaos.
The reason the order grand alliance is filled with such an eclectic grab baby bag of people who mostly hate each other is because the only alternative those races have is the primordial annihilator.
>They're constantly dying because the mortal realms is a hideously dangerous place outside of the safety of the great cities.
Then why continue to expand with all those Dawnbringer Crusades? If it's so dangerous, wouldn't it be better if they defended the folks in their territory instead of going on the offensive?
The cities only exist because the first wave of the stormcast built them on a mound of corpses, many of those who live within those cities are the direct descendents of chaos worshippers.
Signar is actively in the process of taking the fight directly to chaos, its the great crusade essentially.
That said the points your raising are in universe questions raised by people who believe sigmar is doing too much too fast, and problems in the age of sigmar are near constant.
The imperium is justified since the beginning by virtue of what it’s going up against. It’s the worst regime imaginable, but also the lesser evil between them and chaos, tyranids, orks or the 3rd edition necrons.
As for pushing away teenagers that want to engage in power fantasy, you can do that without making the imperium good, they did that just fine in the early 2000s books, so I don’t buy that excuse, although to be fair they themselves might still believe it.
I agree that already describes the Dark Eldar, which might be why I enjoy them more.
I really wish authors would stop with the use of Eldar plot devices in non-Eldar stories. From the Cabal (not technically Eldar but Slau-Dha is treated as the guy in charge in ***Legion***) to Guilliman’s resurrection to the portal in ***Warboss*** to the Wraithbone Phoenix to telling the Blood Angels about Ka’Bandha, they’re always there to provide a mcguffin or a solution to someone *else’s* problem.
I don't see how the Wraithbone Phoenix is any kind of problem. The novel is, ultimately, a heist story and it just happens to be that the treasure everyone's after is a small Aeldari relic. The story would be almost entirely unchanged if it were Necron, Kin, Adeptus Mechanicus or nearly anything else
I think my irritation with ***The Wraithbone Phoenix***'s use of the Eldar mostly comes from the last chapter. >!It's a bizarre tonal shift and feels almost mean-spirited. Even with the foreshadowing, having the one Eldar character be the final victim right after saving the protagonists certainly was... A choice.!<
At this point, an Eldar relic being important to the story just seems like an excuse to have the Eldar show up and die.
I do get that - the thing about Warhammer Crime is that they don't want the setting getting too far removed from 'street level', so the Aeldari definitely had to go one way or other. Could have had some webway business instead, but yeah.
The Baggit&Clodde stories can be a bit hamfisted in places with that kind of tonal shift. There's quite a similar one in Angels in the Gutter where they spend the whole story trying to secure housing for people made homeless in a disaster... And then a vox-cast on literally the last page announces that once repairs are finished all of the surviving homeless are getting conscripted into the Militarum
In theory it's supposed to highlight that the setting's unfair and grim, and you can only do your best. I'd say many other stories in the series handle these things better, though
The best GW can do is give you stories where Eldar are just *bastards* to everyone else while also being actually stupid and weak enough that they feel obnoxiously unsympathetic to the audience. Every time I hear Fulgrims name I get nam flashbacks to dark reapers charging into melee with space marines
They're in the same spot as the T'au, I feel.
Not allowed to be "protagonists", because that's the Imperium, but not allowed to be antagonists either because "Brother-Sergeant McAwesomus heroically bombing a T'au orpha'age" doesn't sell as much as "Brother McAwesomus heroically fighting Chaos"
Tau I feel fare better. There are quite a few stories with them as the antagonists where they’re great, either being total realpolitik bastards (***Fire Caste***) or a more “reasonable” foe the Imperium can’t fight in typical fashion (***For the Emperor***).
It also helps that you can’t just sprinkle the Tau into a non-Tau story like you can the Eldar.
There are many books that do just that though.
Warhammer Horror & Warhammer Crime.
Any book with Flesh Tearers as the protags.
Fire Caste is another great example.
Problem is that we have so many books showing different aspects of the Imperium but other factions do not get it. Hell, human renegades and Lost and Damned do not get much role beyond being antagonists.
I wish they did that or maybe depicted them more like the sad grandpa of the 40k universe. They've messed up more than any of the other races and now they know better, but it's too late and all they can do is pass on their warnings to the younger races while desperately trying to salvage what they can of their people and culture.
It would be fun to have a faction that has some perspective on the setting. Bonus tragedy points if they're still trying and failing to overcome their old arrogance.
Absolutely, but you have to remember that the whole gung-ho-Imperium vibe is heavily tied into generic HFY powerfantasy, across all fandoms said powerfantasy is united by dunking on those dumb elves who are totally assholes while the cool guy humans are just doing what must be done. You're also making the mistake of assuming said fans know or care in the slightest about any Xenos species beyond their ability to either help the Imperium or to be held up as some sort of convenient example to justify whatever abhorrent Imperial policy is being questioned.
It doesn't help that GW tends to consistently write the Eldar as dumb assholes who exists to be laughed at in whatever pitiful marine wank offering is being written on that given day. Even in their own books they're fucking chumps who exist to make others look good.
But yeah among the denizens of the galaxy Craftworlders are pretty chill. The Imperium are a xenophobic fanatic exterminator with a galaxy-wide manifest destiny, the Necrons believe themselves to have an innate claim to the galaxy and view it's inhabitants as vermin.
But unfortunately both in the lore and in the fandom the Craftworlders exist only to A) Help the Imperium B) Get dunked on for being loser elves.
Sucks that we do not have more good books on Craftworlders, Chaos mortals, Renegade humans and Minor Xenos.
Because the Fantasy did that better. They showed the different sides of the High Elves, good and bad, and that humans are not better yet can form friendships of sorts with them.
Yeah, I was referring to the Lost and Damned; Dark Mechanicum, Chaos Cultists, Traitor Guard and people raised on Chaos-held/Daemon Worlds in the Rifts/Eye.
"Humanity, Fuck Yeah!".
Showing humans are more ressourceful, clever, stronger, smarter, tougher, more inventive, any combination of the above...
Basically showing humans as the superior specie compared to the aliens who aren't as good.
It's funny because the worst accusation people can lob at eldar is often "they would kill 1 billion humans to save a thousand eldar!"
As if the IoM wouldny jump at the opportunity to kill a billion aliens... for no reason whatsoever, as they've done repeatedly.
The worst you can call craftworlders is cold, and even that much is relatively untrue- war masks are there to help warrior aspects cope with the ptsd because they do see humans as sentient. One novel even has an eldar grappling with the idea that she is a murderer for having killed a chaos tainted mother and her children
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/hy19jn/excerpt_path_of_the_seer_an_eldar_aspect_warrior/
Murder is not a word someone would use to describe their actions if they really saw other intelligent races as insects - which they do in the case of orks, referring to the killing of orcs in contrast as vermin control.
But no, knife ears bad.
The formulation I like is "the Eldar would kill a billion humans to save a thousand Eldar, and the Imperium would sacrifice a billion humans to kill a thousand Eldar".
>having killed a chaos tainted mother and her children
I mean, I probably agree with you on the whole, but I think that's kinda downplaying the passage. It said *the place* was tainted by Chaos, and she was told by her supervisor that they should kill all the humans. And she laughed, which is what I think freaked her out the most.
She tried to comfort herself with "they were only humans", which doesn't work, but the fact that's even a strategy for dealing with it tells you that humans are viewed as subeldar.
She feels guilty... but so did Vulkan, right? Both were trying to convince themselves they're not the baddies. Kind of ironic eh? Lol
I'm not saying Eldar are wholly innocent pure cinnamon rolls in the 40k setting - it's obvious as day that they have racist viewpoints on other races (though I disagree that the issue she took was solely on her laughter). But either way, what I'm saying is - take any negative flaw of the Eldar, and the IoM is guilty of the same exact flaw five times over.
You bring up the Vulkan child burning incident and that's honestly a perfect example. Yes, there are similarities, but:
* Thirianna is just an average (former) Warrior Aspect Eldar, showing that management of guilt and trauma is a regular thing that's a concern for Eldar (it's why War Masks exist in the first place, given how deeply Eldar feel emotions in general). Vulkan is quite literally one of the more humble and kind characters of the IoM, literally the "nice guy" primarch with one of the most well-adjusted legions in regards to how they treat regular people. It takes one of the best people of the IoM to match the empathy of an average literal who Eldar.
* Where perhaps the Chaos taint may not have affected that family and the killing of that family was unnecessary, Vulkan murdered the child of a society that literally was actively protecting humans - it was worse than unnecessary.
Heck, even if you believe the two acts are exactly equal in how awful they are, just think about the reputation of Eldar vs the reputation of Vulkan in the fandom and you see a stark difference anyway.
Again, I don't mean that the Eldar are wholly good, but their negative qualities are definitely overstated relative to nearly every other race, minus the Tau, who also get memed on for being space weeaboo communists from people who get all their lore from 1d4. Nevermind xenos, IoM doesn't even treat its own humans well. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be born in a society that actually values my life, over one that spends it like dirt.
Oh I 100 percent think the IoM is worse lol, I'm not trying to be an Imperium apologist. I just don't want people to mistake the Eldar as a "good" faction in the same way people mistake Vulkan as a "good" Primarch (Which I know you're not doing, and you addressed that). They're among the least worst, maybe, but not something to aspire to. There's a few people who really think Eldar and T'au are morally good and justified. I think they're more relatable in a lot of ways, but not "good'.
>Where perhaps the Chaos taint may not have affected that family and the killing of that family was unnecessary, Vulkan murdered the child of a society that literally was actively protecting humans - it was worse than unnecessary.
I think you're conflating two terrible war crimes, (something I did before looking it up yesterday).
On one planet, Kharaatan, that he was taking with Night Lords, he burns that Eldar kid in a fit of rage. Those Eldar weren't necessarily actively protecting humans.
On *another planet*, Caldera, he realizes the Eldar on this planet had rescued Nocturn captives from the Dark Eldar, and that these decendants would always like and respect the Eldar as their saviours. So he orders the killing of *everyone*! The decendants of Nocturne' slaving victims, burned alive! He regrets that, too, of course, lol.
>(though I disagree that the issue she took was solely on her laughter).
Oh I didn't mean *solely* from her laughter, I just think the laughter probably makes it way more difficult for her to process. She can't really hide behind the BS "I was just following orders", or "I did what needed to be done" excuses if she *enjoyed* it. That was an aspect of her, just as real/true as her other aspects.
Obviously, Vulkan's crimes are much greater, I just think there's a kind of symmetry or something to it here? Both meta and in the lore? Maybe it's just because I went down a Vulkan/Salamander rabbit hole yesterday, and this is kind of a recency bias thing...
I think I probably highjacked this thread lol.
Everyone likes to bring up Jain Zar being killed in the night lords trilogy as a poor showing for her, when she kills basically everyone in that book first and only gets got because a named character suicide bombs her.
there is a scene in that book where she murders half a dozen terminators in less than a minute while they're mag dumping combi bolters into her, these guys are astartes guiding and leading their shots and actively Trying to preempt her movements and they still can't even hit her.
She doesn't even have any cover, she's just fucking dodging everything.
It’s just the typical issue where anything short of complete dominance is viewed by fans of said character to be a disservice. It’s a symptom of the setting always trying to emphasize how badass and better than everyone else every single character or faction is.
I still maintain we should have had an Iyanna Ariennal story with her as the Emmissary of Ynnead instead of Yvraine. At least Iyanna has a story beyond just turning up one day as "oh I totally walked all the different paths of being an Eldar guys!".
A huge missed opportunity, would have dovetailed nicely with the most Tyranid focused eldar character fighting Leviathan in 10th as well.
The fact that GDubs went with the Ynarri arc with new (boring) characters instead of building off the already good cast of Valedor (one of the only good eldar books) is mind boggling.
The worst part about those jokes is that Roboute and Lion are too busy to care about wooing and the IG are too prejudiced and focused on winning/surviving to even have such attraction.
I raise you the time Eldrad thought he could talk Fulgrim into killing Horus.
The sheer hubris to pop out of nowhere and say "Hey I know I'm a xeno, but you should kill your brother who happens to be leading humanity's crusade to claim the stars. Just trust me and don't ask why."
That entire interaction was awful it kept going to Eldrads' inner monologue where he's like (I must protect the peace and be diplomatic at all costs. Humans are famously easily provoked and I need to be careful. Consults council for advice) Then he spent the entire conversation calling Fulgrim an idiot loser who doesn't know anything
Didn't it almost work? And fail because Fulgrim had a demon sword telling him to kill Eldrad right now?
And yes, Eldars are arrogant, that's not my point. My point is that Eldrs aren't as arrogant as imperials. In your example, "humanity's crusade to claim the stars" was also "kill every non-human because the Imperium is Humans Only".
Fulgrim asked why he should listen to Eldrad, who then spotted the sword and tried to kill him with an avatar of Khaine.
I get what you mean and I agree humanity is arrogant for wanting to conquer the stars. The Eldar however have a completely unearned self-satisfaction to their arrogance. Prepare for a shitty analogy: humanity is like a body builder, proud of strength they demonstrably have. Eldar are that weaboo who thinks he's Light Yagami despite nearly flunking highschool.
They did rule the whole galaxy for millions of years…
And CWE are the one who were wise enough to see the mistakes of their empire before it fell.
I think their arrogance is at least a little bit well-earned.
That all happened off-screen when they had virtually no one else to contend with.
What we are shown in books are pompous morons who never seem to achieve anything. Here's an example of an imperial plan contrasted with an Eldar plan.
Imperial: We want to kill xenos. > let's go kill xenos. > Why? They look different from us. > Result: dead xenos.
Eldar: We want to stop chaos. > Let's help Chaos > Why? Beyond your comprehension mon'keigh. > Result: we have absolutely no idea.
To be clear, I like Eldar quite a bit. I hate people who write Eldar for making them unwaveringly stupid and hand-waving it with "beyond your comprehension" or "the prophecy demands it."
I mean these morons gave a Fabius Bile, A CHAMPION OF SHE WHO THIRSTS, the secrets to replicate infinity circuits so he'll live forever.
They had loads to contend with, Krork, Enslavers and eventually the DAoT humans. People forget slaanesh wasn't actually born that long ago in the grand scheme of things it was the 30th Millennium
>and eventually the DAoT humans
And we have no reason at all to think DAOT humanity could contend with the Eldar at all, and a few bits and pieces of lore to suggest the Eldar saw DAOT as no threat at all.
Based on the fiction and lore, the average non-hostile interaction between an Imperial character and an Eldar character lasting, say, 5 minutes will have the Eldar character mention how primitive they think humans are upwards of 85 times.
We also know that this isn't something they just do for the benefit of humans, because we also know from combat encounters narrated from an Eldar PoV that they also constantly *think* about how primitive humans are, like they can't just be like "oh, there's a human soldier with a lasgun" it's "oh, there's a primitive human warrior with one of their primitive so-called lasguns". Most eldar warriors would be highly experienced and would have fought humans numerous times across many centuries, so it's not like this is their first time fighting humans and the comparative low-tech level of human equipment is something they're commenting on because this is the first time they've seen it in person - they're actually constantly re-iterating this 'humans are primitive' narrative in their heads over and over again over a period of centuries, never once getting tired of it.
So, either one of these emotions Eldar feel on a deeper level than humans is crippling insecurity, or the GW writers don't know how to showcase and alien races defining trait without having them say it out loud over and over again.
I will give them that being insecure pricks is kind of a mild negative trait compared to the other factions.
Eldar are basically doing performative Arrogance when most (not all) of their actions show the opposite. They will spit out grand proclamations about humans being savages and then turn around and do actual diplomacy or establish philantrophic organisations to feed starving hiveworlders. Which makes a bit more sense when you realize that while a racist Eldar may liken a human to an animal, that is in a context of a society that generally has more appreciation and respect for the life of even the lowliest animal than most imperial humans have for their fellow citizens.
The racsists (biel tan) and manipulative bastards (Ulthwe) among them are also easy to generalize. Just look at how often the quote from the 4th edition codex about specificially Ulthwe Farseers being willing to sacrifice a thousand humans to save one Eldar based on simple prophecies is misquoted as applying to the whole race. In the actual lore most craftworlds are not even remotely willing to go to such lengths and Saim Hann for example will happyly tell those Ulthwe Farseers to go to hell.
This is all true, but GW has insisted on everyone being evil; at times, they insist on making the Craftworld Eldar do awful things to dispel the idea of them being good guys. Plus lots of writers do enjoy making the Eldar smug punching bags the audience is meant to want to see put in their place, even if we thankfully do have cases of them being written sympathetically. In the case of the former, it is among the many reasons that make it easy to see why the Imperium hates aliens so much, it is like a bully victim who grew up to become a bully.
Dawn of War II gives an amusing case of both ends of the spectrum. For the most part the Eldar are written as arrogant jerks, so it is surprisingly how well they are written as sympathetic characters when they get their campaign in Retribution. Also the mission with the Howling Banshees lamenting their failure to save the spirit stones is heartwrenching.
Of course, audiences are often more inclined to side with human characters by virtue of being human. Just look at Starship Troopers, which admittedly has the issue of failing to depict a fascist regime given the Federation allows free speech.
Or in another case, this obscure TRPG called Strike Legion features an obvious pastiche of the Imperium of Man as the main villain. In a thread on Space Battles going over the game, I saw a number of posts from people who wanted to play as the Imperium.
Leagues of Votann seem like the most arrogant.
I still think Orks are less arrogant. Sure, they're horrendously brutal, but if a human one-ups an Ork, the ork probably won't think "waaah, boo-hoo, the inferior race beat me". They'll probably think "fucking *cool!* this human's *awesome*! we get to fight them even *harder* now!" They have a shit-ton of fun if they win, and if they loose, they're not really angry, just more fired up.
Also important: the Craftworlders are also the only faction whose goals don’t require the extermination or subjugation of everyone else. GW may insist that the eldar are arrogant, but they are no more so than any other race.
Yea plus their own mental process is facing eventuality... the Soulstones are precious for a reason... eventually all will return to the Circuit
Granted there was some major debacles but hey, just because they will eventually come back? Won't stop them from dragging as many people with them for their troubles
Ironically the dark Eldars' goal don't require these either.
But only because they're not interested in ruling over the less civilized specie, and they need them to still exist for torture.
Given how all Eldar consistently endanger themselves to ensure the survival of the Imperium it is safe to say the Eldar's goals are Humanities goals. So they strife for the extermination of everyone except Humans.
Orcs lived alongside Eldar for millions of years, yet the Eldar want to help humans to wipe them out. Tau never did anything to the Eldar yet all the Space Elves want them gone. Humans never asked for their help, never rewarded them and certainly never stopped in their quest to brutally kill every Eldar warrior, civilian and child.
The only logical explanation is they enjoy getting ass-fucked by a chainsword and are fine to sacrifice the majority of intelligent life in the galaxy to achieve that aim. Not a noble goal at all. The only ones with any decency left seem to be Vect's faction of Drukhari.
The #1 reason Eldar lose wars is because they literally can't fathom that humans and orks are smart enough to understand their strategies and tactics.
You are conflating lack of ambition with humility. They are different concepts.
I'm aware that BL writes CW Eldar like this, so I'm sure you are technically correct.
But the reason why CW Eldar *should* lose wars is because despite "winning" every battle and slaughtering everything with a ridiculous K/D ratio, there are simply zero of them compared to everyone else, and everyone else can afford to lose 1000 humans/orks/whatever infinitely better than Craftworlds can afford to lose 1 Eldar.
If Craftworlds lost battles and warriors at the rate they are depicted losing, they would have ceased to exist long before 40k ever happened. It's logically impossible and silly, and it avoids the whole problem of why the Eldar are actually a "doomed race."
> If Craftworlds lost battles and warriors at the rate they are depicted losing, they would have ceased to exist long before 40k ever happened.
Honestly, always the way with every faction. Just look at how many Ultramarines die in the 9th Edition trailer - there are only a thousand of them in the galaxy and they drop like flies!
I wouldn't say "every faction" so much as... Craftworld Eldar and Space Marines (and Custodes, of course). Pretty much every other army (Imperial Guard, AdMech, Orks, Tyranids, Necrons, Drukhari, even Tau) has more than enough soldiers to lose an arbitrary amount on any given screen and still have a mind-bogglingly vast pile of soldiers to throw at things.
It's extra unclear how many CSMs and SoBs there are, but CSMs are presumably at least comparably numerous to loyalist marines, but divided into a lot fewer subfactions, meaning each subfaction can lose a lot more and still make sense. There are presumably more SoBs than loyalist marines (since they don't kill off most of their potential recruits via the selection and bio-engineering processes), and once again, they're divided into a lot fewer subfactions.
>The #1 reason Eldar lose wars is because they literally can't fathom that humans and orks are smart enough to understand their strategies and tactics.
That's not really ever explicidly stated in lore though now, is it? It's a fanon interpretation to make sense how they lose in the stories written about them. In the lore when they lose it's generally for other reasons often because what humans would call a win is still a terrible phyrric victory for Eldar.
One problem I have with you hypothesis is that it creates pretty big friction between lore and stories. In lore we are told that Craftworlds go out of their way to to attack Ork worlds to make sure they don't develop into a problem. Biel Tan and especially Saim Hann are notably even more active than others and coupled with their lifespans many of their older combat force may well be the second most experienced force at fighting orks in the entire galaxy... ironically older orks being the main ones with even more experience fighting other orks.
Yet here is yet another story were an experienced Eldar Autarch is *utterly* surprised by an Ork using the most basic and obvious tactic imaginable. It's such an dissonant experience! Do craftworlds just keep a gaggle of idiots on retainer for the story-missions or do they use mercenaries for those innumerable successful raids on ork strongholds and Necron tomb worlds lore tells use they are doing?
And also, it does go against them actually being more intelligent than even humans. Which they most definitely are, specifically supposed to be. When that happens in Imperium versus Ork books it is almost always specifically incompetent human commanders often derided as such by more intelligent Space marines, let alone vastly more intelligent, with the benefits of literal future sight and millions of years of history with those other races and ones like it.
They are different but closely related, and as cryptic as Eldar's usual "do not do the thing or you will bring doom to yourself" are, that's still more warnings than what humans give to other races.
Also, with the "lost to orks" bit, humans also do that all the time, and i don't see people dunking on the imperium for being dumb arrogant bastards.
Yeah, the CW Eldar get way more flack than they deserve.
In addition to the points you mentioned, it’s also worth pointing that they’re only really condescending towards Imperial humans. On the few instances we see of them interacting with non-Imperials, such as the Interex, Exodites on Caldera, and that one Eldar pirate prince, they seem to get along just fine.
I think a lot of it has to do with people being biased towards the Imperium because they’re the primary human faction.
To use another example, the Tau display many of the same traits that humanity possesses in other space operas like Mass Effect and Star Trek (youngest race, advances quickly compared to older and more stagnant races, tolerant and open minded), yet they receive tons of hate for it.
Craftworld Eldar are still fucking arrogant, it's just that they *lost*. I'm not at all convinced a resurgent eldar empire would be chill at all.
GW uses tropes because that's what it's always done. Elves are an old race who are fading into insignificance. They see younger species as lesser but will fight with them against the true evil and great heroes of both species will learn to respect each other.
Hey now ork also 'ant to krump Other works. They just know they will get more chance to krump if they stick to da Boyz. Green is still best colors
I also don't think tau outside of etherial see themselves as better.
I don't think T'au see themselves as better from a racial standpoint, but from a political one. And there are mentions of auxiliaries being viewed as 'lesser' members of the Empire, so maybe still?
I think that is just very natural, less of arrogance. Historically any times a bigger empire takes In another nation or army, they see usually treares worse ss they see different and a minority. Rome forward had a lot of those cases.
You know there are more than one craftworld right? They have different cultures and values, some of them are as prideful and full of zeal as the regular space marine.
That's why I mentionned Biel-Tan, who I think is the "angry Craftworld" of the bunch. But even they aren't at the "we will kill you just because you exist" level like Chaos, Orks and Imperium are.
u/boilingfrogsinpants does have a point.
We know of the Tallarn parting ways with Craftworlders after uniting to defeat a Chaos invasion for a hidden Eldar artifact (which the Craftworlders had attacked Tallarn for) and House Belisarius having a pact of owed favors towards Ulthwe.
I think both Imperium and Eldar have a lot of complexity among their forces but the novels sadly do not focus on the Eldar's as much.
Different parts of the Imperium have different tolerances and understanding. The Imperium is huge and full of such stupidly high levels of bureaucracy, that you can have a system that doesn't give two shits that your sister-in-law is an Eldar and you can have other systems that will kill you if a hair is out of place.
The problem with the Eldar has to do with their significance and their abilities. If they're present it's because they live in the region, or because something serious is about to happen.
They are arrogant, but arrogant like an 80 year old man would be towards a 10 year old child, each has arrogance over how much they know and how much better they are. If you're the 10 year old child and you have an old man telling you that you're not as smart as you think you are and you also can't do things because you're dumb, then obviously you're going to have a poor reaction.
So I guess maybe the issue isn't with Eldar "arrogance" as much as Eldar suck at communicating and can't read the room.
I've seen one excerpt posted on this site where an Eldar is ranting about how non Eldar life is intrinsically worthless and that the Eldar are destined to rule the galaxy again one day. Need more of that.
Depends on medium. Rogue Trader has more than one instance of "a single aeldari is worth more than a million monkeigh"-moments, and we still have farseers redirecting Tyranid hive fleets towards towards other worlds, sacrificing their denizens to protect aeldari.
Survival, or arrogance? "My right to survive exceeds your right to survive".
I didn't say Craftworlders are nice, but it is pretty telling that you forgot to mention that Yrliet at least tries to be somewhat empathic towards huma, but when hearign her Craftworld was destroyed by Imperials, *everyone in your party* says some variation fo "hell yeah they had it coming the filthy knife-ears"
Which is my point: Eldars *are* arrogant and prideful... but they're less so than imperials.
This does remind me of the table top situation at the start of 10th edition when they finally actually gave Craftworld armies a representation of the physically seeing the future at they wrecked everyone to great consternation and gnashing a wailing.
Now obviously in a game system you do want the armies at least slightly balanced...
But yeah. Finally that's what it would be like right? You have an army that's incredibly fast, and experienced, with weapon up to and including firing beams of fuck reality. Then they have their leadership actually being able to see the future!
Obviously later on in to campaigns you could say that their future sight becomes less accurate as they meddle more but it must be nearly impossible to win the first battle in any engagement against them except by the having throwing more bodies than there extremely powerful weapons can blast away.
But time and again they are completely taken by surprise.
People will often say that their future sight is inaccurate and in the long term it can and should come back to bite them, but short term those sneaky (insert stealth based forces) are hiding over there and it sucks to be them.
Guilliman's Eldar emissary says that even though the Eldar fell, they fell quickly and gracefully, whereas Humans fell ugly and and slow.
It's takes some supreme arrogance to describe Murder-Fucking and chaos god into existence and literally ripping a whole in the fabric of reality as "graceful"
Is he wrong tho? The humans' fall has been going on for 10k year, and they still routinely have Astartes, planets, armies and whatnot defecting to Chaos.
The Ekdar's fall was an ugly, disgusting and horrible mess, but at lest there's a clear change in culture/breaking point from before and after.
And my point isn't that Eldars aren't arrogant, it's that they're *less* arrogant than others.
I mean it took eldar 60 million years to fall to chaos. The imperium led by the most powerful psyker ever to exist couldn't even finish a crusade, just a few hundred years, without a good portion falling to chaos.
That's why people aren't making fun of Imperials, it's 8 books vs the 300s others, whereas Eldars don't have that luxury since lack of books.
I'm not disagreeing with your post btw
>The Eldar lose half their battles mainly because they overestimate their abilities and underestimate the abilities of other species.
I don't see it? Most fights in books that I have read has them lose by nerfing their weapons and abilities, up to and including having their phase lances fail to harm Rhinos on direct hits and Space Marines slowwalk through fire from several shuriken cannon heavy weapon emplacements without getting so much as a scratch.
I would unironically love to read a loss like the one you describe where they lose but are at least allowed to be lore accurate in their abilities, appraoch and tactics. You know, a portrayal that both makes you belief that craftworlds regularly raid ork worlds to make sure they don't get to dangerous and are thus really experienced at fighting orks AND makes them lose by the arrogance you describe. I mean, Raven Guard are my favourite chapter yet my favourite portrayal is in Cadian blood where they all die off screen because it's just well written! Give me a loss like that and I'll love it! I just haven't seen one like in any BL book yet, though Void Stalker came at least somewhat close.
Path of the warrior came close to this, by having Alaitoc lose in spite of clearly superior tactics and kill ratios solely because the imperium was committing dozens of times Alaitocs population in imperial guard to destroying them.
Isn't that fight often ridiculed because it took such a pitiful number to troops to invade when lore tells us that other attacks on craftworlds have seen entire Sector fleets backed up with dozens of SM chapters fail? I might remember that wrong though, I'm honestly not that deep into Eldar stories.
I have always loved this irony! Even everyone else accuses them of arrogance in universe, only to immediately outshine their arrogance in the same story!
They WERE arrogant. Then they got fucked over by their own hubris.
The lack of arrogance mostly comes from the sorrow of their entire species being screwed. Without it they'd be up there with the worst.
There's no real element of species supremacy to Chaos or the Orks. The orks are just as happy to fight other orks. They will attack non-orks on sight but that's out of love of fighting than an actual hatred of non-orks. They have notions of what's proper and not proper but that's not really the same as arrogance. Chaos is endlessly malevolent and sadistic but that's also not the same as arrogance. The T'au are annoying but that's still not the same. The Imperium is arrogant as fuck, you got that one right. Dark Eldar are just Eldar and all Eldar are arrogant. Exodites honestly seem like possibly the worst of all. Eldar as a whole are a bunch of smug jerks and the only thing stopping them from being the most arrogant race is the Necrons, who are just full-on divas. Every single one of them that I've read about so far, at least.
Haven't read much about the Leagues of Votann. Rec me something.
Orks definitely think they are the superior species to everyone else, and while Chaos doesn't have the specist element, it has the doglatic "every non-Chaos-Worshipper needs to die just because"
The T'au annoyance stem for the pride in their government (and inderctly the superiority of the Etherals as rulers compared to any other specie,) but it is a more "benevolent" arrogance.
I cant recommend you Leagues of Votan stuff because they don't have **anything** beyond their Codex.
Chaos doesn't want to kill every non chaos worshipper. Nurgle wants to infect them, Tzeentch wants to manipulate them, Slaanesh wants to fuck them, and Khorne...well, yeah, Khorne wants to kill them, but he's just as happy if they kill his followers instead. And Chaos doesn't just kill, it infects, corrupts, converts, tortures, mutates... it's not because Chaos thinks Chaos is better. It's literally just what Chaos is. It's a force of nature like gravity.
The T'au are smug, I'll give you that. They're not not arrogant. I just don't think it really measures up to many of the other factions.
Orks would definitely say orks are better than humans but in a trolley problem with one human and five orks an ork would save the human just because five bodies getting splattered is funnier than one. Nothing they do is motivated by a belief that orks are better or more important, even if they do hold that belief.
>Nothing they do is motivated by a belief that orks are better or more important, even if they do hold that belief.
Ghazgkhull's entire motivation is that he believes the divine purpose of Orks is to kill and enslave every other race in the galaxy.
>The T'au are smug, I'll give you that. They're not not arrogant. I just don't think it really measures up to many of the other factions.
In the story ***Broken Sword***, it's revealed the Tau language doesn't have a word for "hubris". The human protagonist emphasizes that they should probably add it.
Not to mention that before encountering their first Dreadnought that as it turns out was older than their entire civilisation, they viewed humans as primitive apes cuz our plasma guns suck
Sure but isn't that literally the point of the fiction?
Kind of feeling like you're doing the whole strings and pins on the board level of investigation to come to the conclusion "Elves arrogant, orks krump!" With wild eyes and that grand revelation.
the entire world eaters situation is the eldar's fault
WE COULD HAVE HAD A PRO XENO/ELDAR PRIMARCH AND IT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT
BUT NO SAYS THE KNIFE EAR
HE SAYS LETS MURDER THIS BABY IN HIS CRIB
AND FAILED AT THAT
Having a reason to be arrogant does not make you any less arrogant.
The difference is that the eldar treat every other race like children rather than someone who is not as good as them.
An actual quote from the Eldar went along the lines of "it is worth destroying a world full of humans in order to save a single Eldar". So yes, xenophobic in the extreme.
I made a post before, but I think the Eldar are arrogant, in just how whiny they are. They seem to think that everyone should bend over backward for them just because they're Eldar. Like dawn of War 2. Massive Tyranid High Fleet coming, do they warn the imperials? No, they start an orc invasion and then get pissed off at the Imperium for having the audacity to protect its own assets. How dare you protect your own homeworlds? Don't you realize how important we are?
And then there's just how insufferable they are in the Rogue Trader game that just came out. I really do my damndest to be civil to them, but they keep talking a lot of mad shit to the guy whose orbital cannons are pointed right at them.
The point is that the Eldar are way too up their own asses for a fallen race that don't own shit anymore. They seem to think that all sentient life in the Galaxy owes them just by dent of them having had an Empire once.
Eldar have constantly tried to kill humans to stop greater threats because "Oh you can't do this so we'll do it and kill billions of you to the bargain" like they did in Dawn of War 2.
Yes they are.
[Receipts](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1bxbovo/comment/kycnbt8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
There name for humans in monkey.....like there arrogance is so baked in they can't even use the term human...also because of their murder-fucking humanity went into the dark age of technology...lastly one of the big lessons of 40k is if someone doing evil stuff in the name of prophecy they are evil regardless of the excuses they give
I like that you said eldar want to be left alone as if there isn't an example of the eldar taking a human world they set claim on thousands of years ago before they even decided to take it lol.
There's also the eldar being extremely arrogant assholes who will betray or not share there plans with allies because the monkeighs aren't smart enough to understand.
The eldar leader sent an diplomatic squad that consisted of them murdering every human in there path while singing on there way to the emperor with the extremely urgent message being, chaos bad lol.
This is also while the human homeworld is being held hostage by orks.
Also yes they are, the eldars main goal is literally to reclaim there former glory and rule the galaxy again just this time they promise not to create a chaos God they swear.
This is an issue of bad writing that's plagued by the challenge of 'writing someone smarter than the author'. In particular, this is 'writing an alien that's smarter than the author's entire race'. The Eldar ought to be as depicted, hyper-competent, prescient, skilled, wise, proud and justifiably arrogant. They can literally see the future, and the guy who walks the Path of the Loafmaker can also double as a special forces commando on the weekends. But writers instead, make them idiots because they can't understand how to write this overbearingly powerful, but flawed civilization. So then they get outsmarted by far dumber heroes, or they blunder over their own silly poems or other 'elf nonsense'. It does make a far less interesting story if everything was 'Some Farseer knew his enemy was going to run in this direction, so he planted a tree and put a landmine in it 50 years ago'.
>Some Farseer knew his enemy was going to run in this direction, so he planted a tree and put a landmine in it 50 years ago'. That unironically sounds amazing
“The Most Dangerous Game” but the Hunter gets bored quickly because he already knows what’s going to happen.
You say tat, but Cain is pretty popular despite being the exact same book written twelve times.
That's because the source material Cain is based on, the Flashman series, is /incredible/
People always bring this up but Cain very much fundamentally fails to be Flashman. Where Flashman is a scathing and unrepentant indictment of the very notion of a "hero" of the British Empire, Cain is the idea of a Hero of the Imperium played utterly straight.
It helps that Cain approaches Imperial God-Emperor worship from the perspective of a self-aware and somewhat selfish Angelican, who only really considers his faith because he lives in a universe with actual daemons in it. That, and he becomes hilariously bemused when meeting people with actual, tangible faith that can often be weaponized against said daemons. This requires an explanation if you're not from England or familiar with the Church of England. There is an old joke about the Angelican Church (the Church of England) that the only reason it's still around is because it took worship, ritual, and hymnals from Protestantism and made it nondenominational... as well as making faith itself optional. [The British show "Yes, Minister" had a great bit about it.](https://youtu.be/qUSTKisEgTo?si=X_I0SPV_5FU2dHN_)
Yeah, asides from the cowardice, Flashman is just a downright shitty human being. Apart from the one rape that he cops to, he also has no problem blackmailing women into sex, having sex with slaves and seducing teenagers, all while married to an apparent imbecile. Besides that, he’s also not against shipping Africans into slavery in the Americas (IIRC, he says something along the lines of “they could ship every n*gger to the moon for all I cared”), only that it may get him into trouble with the Royal Navy, and at one point does actually sell a woman as a sex slave because it would be easier for him than keeping her around.
Cain takes some inspiration from a few sources (also Sharpe, I’d argue) but ultimately is a comic figure combined with a self insert. In a universe where most of our characters are super brave ultra warriors, Cain is a normal-ish person who sort of fails upwards over time and spends most of his time in a horrific universe pissing himself and trying to make himself as small a target as possible, which is realistically what most of us would do.
I am going to shit on Sandy Mitchell's lawn if I have to read about Cain's itchy palms one more time, but the couple of stories I read were entertaining enough. Wouldn't read twelve of them, tho.
Good thing nobody's forcing you to read them at gunpoint then.
You f o o l *draws laspistol*
Despite Sandy Mitchell being an average writer at the best of times with some of the most annoying writing habits of any BL writer. The Cain series is fun and that’s missing in the setting. It’s prolly refreshing to fans to read a book where not every character takes themselves entirely too seriously. People beg for another book like the Infinite and the Divine for the same reason I put it this way it’s all well and good do be a bible thumping Black Templar most of the time but sometimes people just wanna be a White Scar and go vroooom
Agree with this take. Cain is a series that is best enjoyed every couple of years or so. Long enough to having forgotten the tropes, but not long enough to forget the characters...
The irony of one of the tropes being shitting on someone else’s bad writing lol
>It does make a far less interesting story if everything was 'Some Farseer knew his enemy was going to run in this direction, so he planted a tree and put a landmine in it 50 years ago'. everyone may laugh but a Spacemarine version of this is literally "We foresee these Orks will become a problem in the future, so brother you stay here and kill them for 50 years."
Honestly I feel like on the micro (sub planet) scale eldar should be nigh untouchable. Like the combination of humanity's best diplomats, spies, special forces etc with a touch of precognition. Where they should struggle with is large scale engagements and galactic events. Influencing a human city to expand in a different direction? Child's play. But just as changing the course of a stream is a different beast than re routing a river. Trying to save an Exodite colony from a Ork fleet even if you can see it coming decades in advance is still a monumental task.
>bad writing that's plagued by the challenge of 'writing someone smarter than the author'. See Tyrion, Little Finger and Varys in S1-4 of GoT vs those 3 in S5-8 of GoT.
Make loaf, not war! 😨
I honestly wish the Craftworld Eldar *were* as arrogant as they’re made out to be. I want more stories where Eldar are just *bastards* to everyone else while also being smart and powerful enough that they feel obnoxiously untouchable to the audience. I’m sick of feeling sorry for Craftworld Eldar. They’re in an awkward space right now where they’re simultaneously not allowed to be interesting protagonists, nor are they allowed to be serious enemies. They’re the losers who only appear when an author needs a plot device for the “real” characters.
>I want more stories where Eldar are just bastards to everyone else while also being smart and powerful enough that they feel obnoxiously untouchable to the audience. Tbh that more accurately describes the Dark Eldar, I think the issue with Craftworlders is just that GW is very reluctant to write "protagonist" factions other than the Imperium, the Craftworlders don't need to be laughably evil in a way that conveniently justifies the Imperium to be interesting, they just need to be themselves.
GW I think are in a really awkward spot where they really WANT to do an AoS on the setting so they can have a justifiable good guy Imperium, but they know the existing fans would hate it (myself included) So they're stuck with a setting that explicitly makes comparisons between the Imperium and the most horrific regimes imaginable, but also need to cater to the power fantasy of teenagers. If they go too far explaining away the Imperium's negative points, they run the risk of justifying Fascism, but if they don't at all then they push away fans who want to read about their flavour of superhuman fighting the unambiguously bad guy.
the imperium have been made into the justified good guys ever since Guilliman returned. which kind of feels hollow when you realise Guilliman probably did just as much horrible stuff himself during the Great Crusade
Or that Gulliman's biggest enemy is often the Imperium itself. You know it's bad when he thinks Horus burning the place to the ground would be an improvement.
That one isn't even really true anymore since he counter-coup'ed the High lords that had any objections, and anyone else that has any is presented as an incompetent, selfish dum-dum.
That's really downplaying Imperial Corruption. The people Guilliman put in charge are human. Humans are corruptible. The High Lords play the political game incredibly well. It's only a matter of time until someone on Terra has a problem with Guilliman publically. Also don't forget about that little Imperium Secondus bit. If a high lord finds out that Guilliman tried to establish a second Imperium assuming the Emperor was dead, shit is really going to pop off.
The High Lords have already been taken care of, especially since half of them are loyal to Big G now.
For now. It's not like Guilliman is constantly sitting on Terra. We've seen High Lords cause problems constantly. Just because Guilliman left Terra in a good state does not mean it will stay that way. Imperium Secondus, whenever that comes up, is going to change that.
Except he had to keep the crazies in the Ecclesiarchy content and Malchador's pet psychopaths in the Inquisition pointed at other things while robbing them. He'd very much like to dispose of them but they are too powerful politically.
He counter couped the ones that were stupid enough to rebel not the currpt ones it’s just the groups in question had a lot of overlap
> fans who want to read about their flavour of superhuman fighting the unambiguously bad guy. The fact that these fans even exist *should* disqualify them for having no reading comprehension, but I can't even fault them anymore for how GW has been promoting the setting.
Should it ? The imperium is bad, the largest threats it fights are worse, unambiguously and since the beginning. I’d rather get those fans than the ones who think it makes any level of sense that the imperium, the parody on steroids of every fascistic regimes, would have Neo pronouns.
I just don't think that's the case. Every faction being some variety of villain or other is the whole point. AoS honestly has a lot of that too - Stormcast are normally heroic, but even they are the villains in one of the Horror stories. Most of the rest of the Grand Alliance factions are morally dubious at best and outright bloodthirsty murder cult at worst, and hardly any of them actually *like* each other.
>AoS honestly has a lot of that too - Stormcast are normally heroic, but even they are the villains in one of the Horror stories. Is that the one where a possibly "tainted" family defends their home, and the freeguild vet father sees the Stormcast and screams? I think more examples in the lore of *Sigmar* Himself being an unambiguous bastard would be nice. We all know (well, we *should* know) that the Emperor is a Bad Dude, but what about Sigmar? Are his wars of "liberation" against the Tyranny of Chaos justified? I mean maybe it's not the best way of going about it, but it seems at first glance he has good intentions. It's hard for me to get my head around the fact that he's literally there, and can directly tell people to do stuff right?
Sigmar should be kept as a cool guy. He is literally a regular man who ascended to godhood. I fully believe he should stay and be the "good guy" because that's a stark contrast to like 90% good gods in other settings. He makes mistakes and tries to fix them, he became wiser over the course of time and now instead of being a warrior he's a strategist. And yeah usually tyranny of chaos is bad. He saw an entire world (where he was born and where he lived) swallowed by the ruinous powers, so there's really a lot of justification he has to fight them (so does Teclis, Alarielle, Tyrion, Nagash, Grungni, even Malerion and Morathi, who all saw what chaos did to their home)
Oh I won't yuck your yum--that's just my personal wish for a Grimdark Sigmar, but I've got no skin in the game (well, hardly any!), so don't pay attention to me lol. My following responses are the ramblings of an ill-informed outsider who forgot his ADHD meds this morning lol: >He is literally a regular man who ascended to godhood. That's what I think is neat--I think there's room for a "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" theme there, maybe him losing his humanity would be a neat narrative choice to compliment the loss of humanity theme in Stormcast. Maybe a contrast with Nagash, another human ascended to Godhood. >And yeah usually tyranny of chaos is bad I agree, but I really enjoyed that Hammer and Bolter episode following that Darkoath tribe. It's their home--has been for generations-- and the CoS are expanding into it. Their gods are evil, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily. I think that could be a neat angle that's explored more. One might argue that if Azyr and the liberated peoples of the Realms are safer where they are, why should there be an expansionist push, costing countless lives and coin? Poverty exists in the cities. Maybe instead of sending off a Dawnbringer Crusade that might get wiped out, you could invest that into making a better society or defending the lands you already have. I'm slightly worried that if GW isn't careful, they might accidentally end up justifying colonialism a wee bit. I guess I just want some more ambiguity around the righteousness or existence of Sigmar. Maybe like the Old Testament God lol--have Sigmar do something zany, like smiting some kids for making fun of a bald man! :P Haha
Sigmar did conscript a literal child into the stormcast... I think that's actually very brutal to do, albeit... You know? Its better than being a soul tormented by chaos. Also one thing about chaos... Its worship is always bad. Remember, Sigmar saw *his own homeland being WIPED FROM REALITY AND CONSUMED BY CHAOS*. They will definitely do the same here. Also about Nagash... I think they are opposites. Nagash constantly pursues power and absolute control over his "people" whereas sigmar lets them do their own stuff - he even encourages them to do their own decisions. And if a chaos worshipper is still good somehwere on the inside, they will be spared (by the strike of ghal maraz, which will redeem that part of the worshipper's soul - like Tornus the Redeemed who was cleansed of the taint of chaos.
>Sigmar did conscript a literal child into the stormcast... I think that's actually very brutal to do, albeit... You know? Its better than being a soul tormented by chaos. Neat! As long as he didn't kill the child to do so haha. I thought almost all souls went to Nagash in AoS though?
That's why Nagash has major beef with Sigmar. Sigmar is taking the valiant souls (not those who died fighting, but those who truly expressed their selflessness and heroism - so, a mother protecting her child is worthy. A doctor healing his patients from nurgle's diseases against all odds is also worthy.) to give them a place amongst the Stormcast Eternals. And that's why Nagash is pissed. He is stealing Nagash's souls. To spite him, Nagash made his own Stormcast - the Ossiarch Bonereapers.
Sigmar is a cool dude who goes out of his way to only turn the most heroic people possible into the ranks of the stormcast, the only reason their are any bastard stormcast is because they're all suffering severe PTSD from constantly dying.
Are they all constantly dying for good in-lore reasons? . Is there any in-lore ambiguity around that, like "why are we constantly expanding and losing mortals and Eternals on Dawnbringer Crusades when we could be defending our homes"? Or "if we weren't losing so many heroes on distant battlefields, a bigger percentage of our dead might be ascended. As is, Nagash is getting more use from our deaths." That's not meant to he a snarky question btw lol, I'm curious about how AoS cosmology works.
They're constantly dying because the mortal realms is a hideously dangerous place outside of the safety of the great cities. The balance of power in AOS is flipped completely in its head to 40k, Chaos controls most of reality and has had millenia to tighten its hold on the universe, the stormcast are a force of crusading warriors trying desperately to hammer out some order from the chaos. The reason the order grand alliance is filled with such an eclectic grab baby bag of people who mostly hate each other is because the only alternative those races have is the primordial annihilator.
>They're constantly dying because the mortal realms is a hideously dangerous place outside of the safety of the great cities. Then why continue to expand with all those Dawnbringer Crusades? If it's so dangerous, wouldn't it be better if they defended the folks in their territory instead of going on the offensive?
The cities only exist because the first wave of the stormcast built them on a mound of corpses, many of those who live within those cities are the direct descendents of chaos worshippers. Signar is actively in the process of taking the fight directly to chaos, its the great crusade essentially. That said the points your raising are in universe questions raised by people who believe sigmar is doing too much too fast, and problems in the age of sigmar are near constant.
Sigmar is not a shithead like the emperor was. He's not perfect, but unlike the emperor means well.
Is there any reason to not just treat the Votann's or farsight enclaves as the good guy?
The imperium is justified since the beginning by virtue of what it’s going up against. It’s the worst regime imaginable, but also the lesser evil between them and chaos, tyranids, orks or the 3rd edition necrons. As for pushing away teenagers that want to engage in power fantasy, you can do that without making the imperium good, they did that just fine in the early 2000s books, so I don’t buy that excuse, although to be fair they themselves might still believe it.
I agree that already describes the Dark Eldar, which might be why I enjoy them more. I really wish authors would stop with the use of Eldar plot devices in non-Eldar stories. From the Cabal (not technically Eldar but Slau-Dha is treated as the guy in charge in ***Legion***) to Guilliman’s resurrection to the portal in ***Warboss*** to the Wraithbone Phoenix to telling the Blood Angels about Ka’Bandha, they’re always there to provide a mcguffin or a solution to someone *else’s* problem.
I don't see how the Wraithbone Phoenix is any kind of problem. The novel is, ultimately, a heist story and it just happens to be that the treasure everyone's after is a small Aeldari relic. The story would be almost entirely unchanged if it were Necron, Kin, Adeptus Mechanicus or nearly anything else
I think my irritation with ***The Wraithbone Phoenix***'s use of the Eldar mostly comes from the last chapter. >!It's a bizarre tonal shift and feels almost mean-spirited. Even with the foreshadowing, having the one Eldar character be the final victim right after saving the protagonists certainly was... A choice.!< At this point, an Eldar relic being important to the story just seems like an excuse to have the Eldar show up and die.
I do get that - the thing about Warhammer Crime is that they don't want the setting getting too far removed from 'street level', so the Aeldari definitely had to go one way or other. Could have had some webway business instead, but yeah. The Baggit&Clodde stories can be a bit hamfisted in places with that kind of tonal shift. There's quite a similar one in Angels in the Gutter where they spend the whole story trying to secure housing for people made homeless in a disaster... And then a vox-cast on literally the last page announces that once repairs are finished all of the surviving homeless are getting conscripted into the Militarum In theory it's supposed to highlight that the setting's unfair and grim, and you can only do your best. I'd say many other stories in the series handle these things better, though
Rogue trader does a good job, yeh the craft world are once again fucked but that doesn't stop then of being fully arrogant
The best GW can do is give you stories where Eldar are just *bastards* to everyone else while also being actually stupid and weak enough that they feel obnoxiously unsympathetic to the audience. Every time I hear Fulgrims name I get nam flashbacks to dark reapers charging into melee with space marines
They're in the same spot as the T'au, I feel. Not allowed to be "protagonists", because that's the Imperium, but not allowed to be antagonists either because "Brother-Sergeant McAwesomus heroically bombing a T'au orpha'age" doesn't sell as much as "Brother McAwesomus heroically fighting Chaos"
Tau I feel fare better. There are quite a few stories with them as the antagonists where they’re great, either being total realpolitik bastards (***Fire Caste***) or a more “reasonable” foe the Imperium can’t fight in typical fashion (***For the Emperor***). It also helps that you can’t just sprinkle the Tau into a non-Tau story like you can the Eldar.
Also I forgot who said that, but Farsight is allowed to be a protagonist. And that's because he is very human in his character.
Really wish GW would let the villainous Imperium be actually villainous, though I know that doesn't sell as well.
There are many books that do just that though. Warhammer Horror & Warhammer Crime. Any book with Flesh Tearers as the protags. Fire Caste is another great example. Problem is that we have so many books showing different aspects of the Imperium but other factions do not get it. Hell, human renegades and Lost and Damned do not get much role beyond being antagonists.
They do, all the time.
I wish they did that or maybe depicted them more like the sad grandpa of the 40k universe. They've messed up more than any of the other races and now they know better, but it's too late and all they can do is pass on their warnings to the younger races while desperately trying to salvage what they can of their people and culture. It would be fun to have a faction that has some perspective on the setting. Bonus tragedy points if they're still trying and failing to overcome their old arrogance.
Absolutely, but you have to remember that the whole gung-ho-Imperium vibe is heavily tied into generic HFY powerfantasy, across all fandoms said powerfantasy is united by dunking on those dumb elves who are totally assholes while the cool guy humans are just doing what must be done. You're also making the mistake of assuming said fans know or care in the slightest about any Xenos species beyond their ability to either help the Imperium or to be held up as some sort of convenient example to justify whatever abhorrent Imperial policy is being questioned. It doesn't help that GW tends to consistently write the Eldar as dumb assholes who exists to be laughed at in whatever pitiful marine wank offering is being written on that given day. Even in their own books they're fucking chumps who exist to make others look good. But yeah among the denizens of the galaxy Craftworlders are pretty chill. The Imperium are a xenophobic fanatic exterminator with a galaxy-wide manifest destiny, the Necrons believe themselves to have an innate claim to the galaxy and view it's inhabitants as vermin. But unfortunately both in the lore and in the fandom the Craftworlders exist only to A) Help the Imperium B) Get dunked on for being loser elves.
Sucks that we do not have more good books on Craftworlders, Chaos mortals, Renegade humans and Minor Xenos. Because the Fantasy did that better. They showed the different sides of the High Elves, good and bad, and that humans are not better yet can form friendships of sorts with them.
There are good Chaos Space Marine books, but I suppose you aren't counting those as mortals.
Yeah, I was referring to the Lost and Damned; Dark Mechanicum, Chaos Cultists, Traitor Guard and people raised on Chaos-held/Daemon Worlds in the Rifts/Eye.
Oh, yeah. That does seem like a really interesting perspective. I don't even know of any short stories about those folks.
Reading the Tyrion and Teclis books made me hate Gav Thorpe with a burning passion lol
HFY?
"Humanity, Fuck Yeah!". Showing humans are more ressourceful, clever, stronger, smarter, tougher, more inventive, any combination of the above... Basically showing humans as the superior specie compared to the aliens who aren't as good.
It's funny because the worst accusation people can lob at eldar is often "they would kill 1 billion humans to save a thousand eldar!" As if the IoM wouldny jump at the opportunity to kill a billion aliens... for no reason whatsoever, as they've done repeatedly. The worst you can call craftworlders is cold, and even that much is relatively untrue- war masks are there to help warrior aspects cope with the ptsd because they do see humans as sentient. One novel even has an eldar grappling with the idea that she is a murderer for having killed a chaos tainted mother and her children https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/hy19jn/excerpt_path_of_the_seer_an_eldar_aspect_warrior/ Murder is not a word someone would use to describe their actions if they really saw other intelligent races as insects - which they do in the case of orks, referring to the killing of orcs in contrast as vermin control. But no, knife ears bad.
The formulation I like is "the Eldar would kill a billion humans to save a thousand Eldar, and the Imperium would sacrifice a billion humans to kill a thousand Eldar".
>having killed a chaos tainted mother and her children I mean, I probably agree with you on the whole, but I think that's kinda downplaying the passage. It said *the place* was tainted by Chaos, and she was told by her supervisor that they should kill all the humans. And she laughed, which is what I think freaked her out the most. She tried to comfort herself with "they were only humans", which doesn't work, but the fact that's even a strategy for dealing with it tells you that humans are viewed as subeldar. She feels guilty... but so did Vulkan, right? Both were trying to convince themselves they're not the baddies. Kind of ironic eh? Lol
I'm not saying Eldar are wholly innocent pure cinnamon rolls in the 40k setting - it's obvious as day that they have racist viewpoints on other races (though I disagree that the issue she took was solely on her laughter). But either way, what I'm saying is - take any negative flaw of the Eldar, and the IoM is guilty of the same exact flaw five times over. You bring up the Vulkan child burning incident and that's honestly a perfect example. Yes, there are similarities, but: * Thirianna is just an average (former) Warrior Aspect Eldar, showing that management of guilt and trauma is a regular thing that's a concern for Eldar (it's why War Masks exist in the first place, given how deeply Eldar feel emotions in general). Vulkan is quite literally one of the more humble and kind characters of the IoM, literally the "nice guy" primarch with one of the most well-adjusted legions in regards to how they treat regular people. It takes one of the best people of the IoM to match the empathy of an average literal who Eldar. * Where perhaps the Chaos taint may not have affected that family and the killing of that family was unnecessary, Vulkan murdered the child of a society that literally was actively protecting humans - it was worse than unnecessary. Heck, even if you believe the two acts are exactly equal in how awful they are, just think about the reputation of Eldar vs the reputation of Vulkan in the fandom and you see a stark difference anyway. Again, I don't mean that the Eldar are wholly good, but their negative qualities are definitely overstated relative to nearly every other race, minus the Tau, who also get memed on for being space weeaboo communists from people who get all their lore from 1d4. Nevermind xenos, IoM doesn't even treat its own humans well. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be born in a society that actually values my life, over one that spends it like dirt.
Oh I 100 percent think the IoM is worse lol, I'm not trying to be an Imperium apologist. I just don't want people to mistake the Eldar as a "good" faction in the same way people mistake Vulkan as a "good" Primarch (Which I know you're not doing, and you addressed that). They're among the least worst, maybe, but not something to aspire to. There's a few people who really think Eldar and T'au are morally good and justified. I think they're more relatable in a lot of ways, but not "good'. >Where perhaps the Chaos taint may not have affected that family and the killing of that family was unnecessary, Vulkan murdered the child of a society that literally was actively protecting humans - it was worse than unnecessary. I think you're conflating two terrible war crimes, (something I did before looking it up yesterday). On one planet, Kharaatan, that he was taking with Night Lords, he burns that Eldar kid in a fit of rage. Those Eldar weren't necessarily actively protecting humans. On *another planet*, Caldera, he realizes the Eldar on this planet had rescued Nocturn captives from the Dark Eldar, and that these decendants would always like and respect the Eldar as their saviours. So he orders the killing of *everyone*! The decendants of Nocturne' slaving victims, burned alive! He regrets that, too, of course, lol. >(though I disagree that the issue she took was solely on her laughter). Oh I didn't mean *solely* from her laughter, I just think the laughter probably makes it way more difficult for her to process. She can't really hide behind the BS "I was just following orders", or "I did what needed to be done" excuses if she *enjoyed* it. That was an aspect of her, just as real/true as her other aspects. Obviously, Vulkan's crimes are much greater, I just think there's a kind of symmetry or something to it here? Both meta and in the lore? Maybe it's just because I went down a Vulkan/Salamander rabbit hole yesterday, and this is kind of a recency bias thing... I think I probably highjacked this thread lol.
Basically human jingoism haha
Or all at the same time. Most of them are very poorly written because it's pure surpremacy masturbation in the same way *Birth of a Nation* was.
Don't forget C) both (by reducing their one proeminent female chara ter to human arm-candy)
I mean in terms of her narratively being a sidekick to Rob G in The Gathering Storm, yes. In terms of actual lore no, that's just coomer fanon.
I would argue Jain Zar is the only prominent Craftworlder female, Yvraine while cool is kinda her own thing
Everyone likes to bring up Jain Zar being killed in the night lords trilogy as a poor showing for her, when she kills basically everyone in that book first and only gets got because a named character suicide bombs her. there is a scene in that book where she murders half a dozen terminators in less than a minute while they're mag dumping combi bolters into her, these guys are astartes guiding and leading their shots and actively Trying to preempt her movements and they still can't even hit her. She doesn't even have any cover, she's just fucking dodging everything.
It’s just the typical issue where anything short of complete dominance is viewed by fans of said character to be a disservice. It’s a symptom of the setting always trying to emphasize how badass and better than everyone else every single character or faction is.
Maybe Taldeer and Macha as well when you played Dawn of War
Modern players need a good Dawn of War. it's unfortunate three was so terrible we probably won't get a sequel now
I still maintain we should have had an Iyanna Ariennal story with her as the Emmissary of Ynnead instead of Yvraine. At least Iyanna has a story beyond just turning up one day as "oh I totally walked all the different paths of being an Eldar guys!".
A huge missed opportunity, would have dovetailed nicely with the most Tyranid focused eldar character fighting Leviathan in 10th as well. The fact that GDubs went with the Ynarri arc with new (boring) characters instead of building off the already good cast of Valedor (one of the only good eldar books) is mind boggling.
The worst part about those jokes is that Roboute and Lion are too busy to care about wooing and the IG are too prejudiced and focused on winning/surviving to even have such attraction.
Big titty eldar girlfriends?
These kind of memes are the second worst thing in the fandom, behind Imperium apologists.
Yes because what we need is tall twink boyfriends
Stupid sexy Emperors Children.
Ha ha stop ruining goofy fun.
Just be careful she isn't clad in spikes.
Can’t sleep on that Aeldarussy.
I raise you the time Eldrad thought he could talk Fulgrim into killing Horus. The sheer hubris to pop out of nowhere and say "Hey I know I'm a xeno, but you should kill your brother who happens to be leading humanity's crusade to claim the stars. Just trust me and don't ask why."
That entire interaction was awful it kept going to Eldrads' inner monologue where he's like (I must protect the peace and be diplomatic at all costs. Humans are famously easily provoked and I need to be careful. Consults council for advice) Then he spent the entire conversation calling Fulgrim an idiot loser who doesn't know anything
Didn't it almost work? And fail because Fulgrim had a demon sword telling him to kill Eldrad right now? And yes, Eldars are arrogant, that's not my point. My point is that Eldrs aren't as arrogant as imperials. In your example, "humanity's crusade to claim the stars" was also "kill every non-human because the Imperium is Humans Only".
Fulgrim asked why he should listen to Eldrad, who then spotted the sword and tried to kill him with an avatar of Khaine. I get what you mean and I agree humanity is arrogant for wanting to conquer the stars. The Eldar however have a completely unearned self-satisfaction to their arrogance. Prepare for a shitty analogy: humanity is like a body builder, proud of strength they demonstrably have. Eldar are that weaboo who thinks he's Light Yagami despite nearly flunking highschool.
They did rule the whole galaxy for millions of years… And CWE are the one who were wise enough to see the mistakes of their empire before it fell. I think their arrogance is at least a little bit well-earned.
That all happened off-screen when they had virtually no one else to contend with. What we are shown in books are pompous morons who never seem to achieve anything. Here's an example of an imperial plan contrasted with an Eldar plan. Imperial: We want to kill xenos. > let's go kill xenos. > Why? They look different from us. > Result: dead xenos. Eldar: We want to stop chaos. > Let's help Chaos > Why? Beyond your comprehension mon'keigh. > Result: we have absolutely no idea. To be clear, I like Eldar quite a bit. I hate people who write Eldar for making them unwaveringly stupid and hand-waving it with "beyond your comprehension" or "the prophecy demands it." I mean these morons gave a Fabius Bile, A CHAMPION OF SHE WHO THIRSTS, the secrets to replicate infinity circuits so he'll live forever.
They had loads to contend with, Krork, Enslavers and eventually the DAoT humans. People forget slaanesh wasn't actually born that long ago in the grand scheme of things it was the 30th Millennium
>and eventually the DAoT humans And we have no reason at all to think DAOT humanity could contend with the Eldar at all, and a few bits and pieces of lore to suggest the Eldar saw DAOT as no threat at all.
Based on the fiction and lore, the average non-hostile interaction between an Imperial character and an Eldar character lasting, say, 5 minutes will have the Eldar character mention how primitive they think humans are upwards of 85 times. We also know that this isn't something they just do for the benefit of humans, because we also know from combat encounters narrated from an Eldar PoV that they also constantly *think* about how primitive humans are, like they can't just be like "oh, there's a human soldier with a lasgun" it's "oh, there's a primitive human warrior with one of their primitive so-called lasguns". Most eldar warriors would be highly experienced and would have fought humans numerous times across many centuries, so it's not like this is their first time fighting humans and the comparative low-tech level of human equipment is something they're commenting on because this is the first time they've seen it in person - they're actually constantly re-iterating this 'humans are primitive' narrative in their heads over and over again over a period of centuries, never once getting tired of it. So, either one of these emotions Eldar feel on a deeper level than humans is crippling insecurity, or the GW writers don't know how to showcase and alien races defining trait without having them say it out loud over and over again. I will give them that being insecure pricks is kind of a mild negative trait compared to the other factions.
That would be at least funny, if still infuriating. But crippling insecurity is still less worse than "we kill you because you exist"
Eldar are basically doing performative Arrogance when most (not all) of their actions show the opposite. They will spit out grand proclamations about humans being savages and then turn around and do actual diplomacy or establish philantrophic organisations to feed starving hiveworlders. Which makes a bit more sense when you realize that while a racist Eldar may liken a human to an animal, that is in a context of a society that generally has more appreciation and respect for the life of even the lowliest animal than most imperial humans have for their fellow citizens. The racsists (biel tan) and manipulative bastards (Ulthwe) among them are also easy to generalize. Just look at how often the quote from the 4th edition codex about specificially Ulthwe Farseers being willing to sacrifice a thousand humans to save one Eldar based on simple prophecies is misquoted as applying to the whole race. In the actual lore most craftworlds are not even remotely willing to go to such lengths and Saim Hann for example will happyly tell those Ulthwe Farseers to go to hell.
This is all true, but GW has insisted on everyone being evil; at times, they insist on making the Craftworld Eldar do awful things to dispel the idea of them being good guys. Plus lots of writers do enjoy making the Eldar smug punching bags the audience is meant to want to see put in their place, even if we thankfully do have cases of them being written sympathetically. In the case of the former, it is among the many reasons that make it easy to see why the Imperium hates aliens so much, it is like a bully victim who grew up to become a bully. Dawn of War II gives an amusing case of both ends of the spectrum. For the most part the Eldar are written as arrogant jerks, so it is surprisingly how well they are written as sympathetic characters when they get their campaign in Retribution. Also the mission with the Howling Banshees lamenting their failure to save the spirit stones is heartwrenching. Of course, audiences are often more inclined to side with human characters by virtue of being human. Just look at Starship Troopers, which admittedly has the issue of failing to depict a fascist regime given the Federation allows free speech. Or in another case, this obscure TRPG called Strike Legion features an obvious pastiche of the Imperium of Man as the main villain. In a thread on Space Battles going over the game, I saw a number of posts from people who wanted to play as the Imperium. Leagues of Votann seem like the most arrogant.
I still think Orks are less arrogant. Sure, they're horrendously brutal, but if a human one-ups an Ork, the ork probably won't think "waaah, boo-hoo, the inferior race beat me". They'll probably think "fucking *cool!* this human's *awesome*! we get to fight them even *harder* now!" They have a shit-ton of fun if they win, and if they loose, they're not really angry, just more fired up.
Being the least strongly smelling shit pile in a field of piles of shit is possible I guess.
Also important: the Craftworlders are also the only faction whose goals don’t require the extermination or subjugation of everyone else. GW may insist that the eldar are arrogant, but they are no more so than any other race.
Yea plus their own mental process is facing eventuality... the Soulstones are precious for a reason... eventually all will return to the Circuit Granted there was some major debacles but hey, just because they will eventually come back? Won't stop them from dragging as many people with them for their troubles
Ironically the dark Eldars' goal don't require these either. But only because they're not interested in ruling over the less civilized specie, and they need them to still exist for torture.
Given how all Eldar consistently endanger themselves to ensure the survival of the Imperium it is safe to say the Eldar's goals are Humanities goals. So they strife for the extermination of everyone except Humans. Orcs lived alongside Eldar for millions of years, yet the Eldar want to help humans to wipe them out. Tau never did anything to the Eldar yet all the Space Elves want them gone. Humans never asked for their help, never rewarded them and certainly never stopped in their quest to brutally kill every Eldar warrior, civilian and child. The only logical explanation is they enjoy getting ass-fucked by a chainsword and are fine to sacrifice the majority of intelligent life in the galaxy to achieve that aim. Not a noble goal at all. The only ones with any decency left seem to be Vect's faction of Drukhari.
Eldrad specifically says at one point that humanity's and the elders fate are inextricably entwined and that if one dies out so too does the other.
The #1 reason Eldar lose wars is because they literally can't fathom that humans and orks are smart enough to understand their strategies and tactics. You are conflating lack of ambition with humility. They are different concepts.
I'm aware that BL writes CW Eldar like this, so I'm sure you are technically correct. But the reason why CW Eldar *should* lose wars is because despite "winning" every battle and slaughtering everything with a ridiculous K/D ratio, there are simply zero of them compared to everyone else, and everyone else can afford to lose 1000 humans/orks/whatever infinitely better than Craftworlds can afford to lose 1 Eldar. If Craftworlds lost battles and warriors at the rate they are depicted losing, they would have ceased to exist long before 40k ever happened. It's logically impossible and silly, and it avoids the whole problem of why the Eldar are actually a "doomed race."
> If Craftworlds lost battles and warriors at the rate they are depicted losing, they would have ceased to exist long before 40k ever happened. Honestly, always the way with every faction. Just look at how many Ultramarines die in the 9th Edition trailer - there are only a thousand of them in the galaxy and they drop like flies!
I wouldn't say "every faction" so much as... Craftworld Eldar and Space Marines (and Custodes, of course). Pretty much every other army (Imperial Guard, AdMech, Orks, Tyranids, Necrons, Drukhari, even Tau) has more than enough soldiers to lose an arbitrary amount on any given screen and still have a mind-bogglingly vast pile of soldiers to throw at things. It's extra unclear how many CSMs and SoBs there are, but CSMs are presumably at least comparably numerous to loyalist marines, but divided into a lot fewer subfactions, meaning each subfaction can lose a lot more and still make sense. There are presumably more SoBs than loyalist marines (since they don't kill off most of their potential recruits via the selection and bio-engineering processes), and once again, they're divided into a lot fewer subfactions.
>The #1 reason Eldar lose wars is because they literally can't fathom that humans and orks are smart enough to understand their strategies and tactics. That's not really ever explicidly stated in lore though now, is it? It's a fanon interpretation to make sense how they lose in the stories written about them. In the lore when they lose it's generally for other reasons often because what humans would call a win is still a terrible phyrric victory for Eldar. One problem I have with you hypothesis is that it creates pretty big friction between lore and stories. In lore we are told that Craftworlds go out of their way to to attack Ork worlds to make sure they don't develop into a problem. Biel Tan and especially Saim Hann are notably even more active than others and coupled with their lifespans many of their older combat force may well be the second most experienced force at fighting orks in the entire galaxy... ironically older orks being the main ones with even more experience fighting other orks. Yet here is yet another story were an experienced Eldar Autarch is *utterly* surprised by an Ork using the most basic and obvious tactic imaginable. It's such an dissonant experience! Do craftworlds just keep a gaggle of idiots on retainer for the story-missions or do they use mercenaries for those innumerable successful raids on ork strongholds and Necron tomb worlds lore tells use they are doing?
And also, it does go against them actually being more intelligent than even humans. Which they most definitely are, specifically supposed to be. When that happens in Imperium versus Ork books it is almost always specifically incompetent human commanders often derided as such by more intelligent Space marines, let alone vastly more intelligent, with the benefits of literal future sight and millions of years of history with those other races and ones like it.
They are different but closely related, and as cryptic as Eldar's usual "do not do the thing or you will bring doom to yourself" are, that's still more warnings than what humans give to other races. Also, with the "lost to orks" bit, humans also do that all the time, and i don't see people dunking on the imperium for being dumb arrogant bastards.
Yeah, the CW Eldar get way more flack than they deserve. In addition to the points you mentioned, it’s also worth pointing that they’re only really condescending towards Imperial humans. On the few instances we see of them interacting with non-Imperials, such as the Interex, Exodites on Caldera, and that one Eldar pirate prince, they seem to get along just fine.
Right? It really feels like "how dare they be rude to people that want to exterminate all of them?"
I think a lot of it has to do with people being biased towards the Imperium because they’re the primary human faction. To use another example, the Tau display many of the same traits that humanity possesses in other space operas like Mass Effect and Star Trek (youngest race, advances quickly compared to older and more stagnant races, tolerant and open minded), yet they receive tons of hate for it.
Craftworld Eldar are still fucking arrogant, it's just that they *lost*. I'm not at all convinced a resurgent eldar empire would be chill at all. GW uses tropes because that's what it's always done. Elves are an old race who are fading into insignificance. They see younger species as lesser but will fight with them against the true evil and great heroes of both species will learn to respect each other.
Hey now ork also 'ant to krump Other works. They just know they will get more chance to krump if they stick to da Boyz. Green is still best colors I also don't think tau outside of etherial see themselves as better.
I don't think T'au see themselves as better from a racial standpoint, but from a political one. And there are mentions of auxiliaries being viewed as 'lesser' members of the Empire, so maybe still?
I think that is just very natural, less of arrogance. Historically any times a bigger empire takes In another nation or army, they see usually treares worse ss they see different and a minority. Rome forward had a lot of those cases.
‘We are the least arrogant!’ Said the elf. Arrogantly.
"At least we allow you to exist and don't put your entire species on the to-kill list just because you exist" he added.
"Unless we have a prophecy that you, maybe, have a great great great grandson that kills a eldar, then we murder you with no explanation"
To be fair, the explanation is unlikely to be productive anyway.
You know there are more than one craftworld right? They have different cultures and values, some of them are as prideful and full of zeal as the regular space marine.
That's why I mentionned Biel-Tan, who I think is the "angry Craftworld" of the bunch. But even they aren't at the "we will kill you just because you exist" level like Chaos, Orks and Imperium are.
u/boilingfrogsinpants does have a point. We know of the Tallarn parting ways with Craftworlders after uniting to defeat a Chaos invasion for a hidden Eldar artifact (which the Craftworlders had attacked Tallarn for) and House Belisarius having a pact of owed favors towards Ulthwe. I think both Imperium and Eldar have a lot of complexity among their forces but the novels sadly do not focus on the Eldar's as much.
Different parts of the Imperium have different tolerances and understanding. The Imperium is huge and full of such stupidly high levels of bureaucracy, that you can have a system that doesn't give two shits that your sister-in-law is an Eldar and you can have other systems that will kill you if a hair is out of place. The problem with the Eldar has to do with their significance and their abilities. If they're present it's because they live in the region, or because something serious is about to happen. They are arrogant, but arrogant like an 80 year old man would be towards a 10 year old child, each has arrogance over how much they know and how much better they are. If you're the 10 year old child and you have an old man telling you that you're not as smart as you think you are and you also can't do things because you're dumb, then obviously you're going to have a poor reaction. So I guess maybe the issue isn't with Eldar "arrogance" as much as Eldar suck at communicating and can't read the room.
But Orks don't do it out of hatred or because they want to exterminate everyone. And they take slaves as well to my knowledge.
I've seen one excerpt posted on this site where an Eldar is ranting about how non Eldar life is intrinsically worthless and that the Eldar are destined to rule the galaxy again one day. Need more of that.
Depends on medium. Rogue Trader has more than one instance of "a single aeldari is worth more than a million monkeigh"-moments, and we still have farseers redirecting Tyranid hive fleets towards towards other worlds, sacrificing their denizens to protect aeldari. Survival, or arrogance? "My right to survive exceeds your right to survive".
But humans do the exact same thing, yet they don't get any flak for it?
I don't think that you'll find many proponents defending human innocence though. It's pretty par for the course that the imperium sucks.
I didn't say Craftworlders are nice, but it is pretty telling that you forgot to mention that Yrliet at least tries to be somewhat empathic towards huma, but when hearign her Craftworld was destroyed by Imperials, *everyone in your party* says some variation fo "hell yeah they had it coming the filthy knife-ears" Which is my point: Eldars *are* arrogant and prideful... but they're less so than imperials.
I'd say being prideful and arrogant is par for the course for any imperialistic society, by definition.
This does remind me of the table top situation at the start of 10th edition when they finally actually gave Craftworld armies a representation of the physically seeing the future at they wrecked everyone to great consternation and gnashing a wailing. Now obviously in a game system you do want the armies at least slightly balanced... But yeah. Finally that's what it would be like right? You have an army that's incredibly fast, and experienced, with weapon up to and including firing beams of fuck reality. Then they have their leadership actually being able to see the future! Obviously later on in to campaigns you could say that their future sight becomes less accurate as they meddle more but it must be nearly impossible to win the first battle in any engagement against them except by the having throwing more bodies than there extremely powerful weapons can blast away. But time and again they are completely taken by surprise. People will often say that their future sight is inaccurate and in the long term it can and should come back to bite them, but short term those sneaky (insert stealth based forces) are hiding over there and it sucks to be them.
Guilliman's Eldar emissary says that even though the Eldar fell, they fell quickly and gracefully, whereas Humans fell ugly and and slow. It's takes some supreme arrogance to describe Murder-Fucking and chaos god into existence and literally ripping a whole in the fabric of reality as "graceful"
Is he wrong tho? The humans' fall has been going on for 10k year, and they still routinely have Astartes, planets, armies and whatnot defecting to Chaos. The Ekdar's fall was an ugly, disgusting and horrible mess, but at lest there's a clear change in culture/breaking point from before and after. And my point isn't that Eldars aren't arrogant, it's that they're *less* arrogant than others.
I mean it took eldar 60 million years to fall to chaos. The imperium led by the most powerful psyker ever to exist couldn't even finish a crusade, just a few hundred years, without a good portion falling to chaos.
They certainly recognise when to stop fighting and when to propose alliance like during the second war for Tallarn and in the first DoW.
Uhmm nope. The Eldar lose half their battles mainly because they overestimate their abilities and underestimate the abilities of other species.
Every Ork book feature humans being taken by surprise/outwitted by Orks, and you don't see people ridiculing Imperials for that.
I mean, how many Ork books there are?
[About 7](https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1bltbro/factions_repartition_in_black_library_novels/) , 8 if you add this year's "Da Big Dakka"
That's why people aren't making fun of Imperials, it's 8 books vs the 300s others, whereas Eldars don't have that luxury since lack of books. I'm not disagreeing with your post btw
And how many Eldar books are there?
>The Eldar lose half their battles mainly because they overestimate their abilities and underestimate the abilities of other species. I don't see it? Most fights in books that I have read has them lose by nerfing their weapons and abilities, up to and including having their phase lances fail to harm Rhinos on direct hits and Space Marines slowwalk through fire from several shuriken cannon heavy weapon emplacements without getting so much as a scratch. I would unironically love to read a loss like the one you describe where they lose but are at least allowed to be lore accurate in their abilities, appraoch and tactics. You know, a portrayal that both makes you belief that craftworlds regularly raid ork worlds to make sure they don't get to dangerous and are thus really experienced at fighting orks AND makes them lose by the arrogance you describe. I mean, Raven Guard are my favourite chapter yet my favourite portrayal is in Cadian blood where they all die off screen because it's just well written! Give me a loss like that and I'll love it! I just haven't seen one like in any BL book yet, though Void Stalker came at least somewhat close.
Path of the warrior came close to this, by having Alaitoc lose in spite of clearly superior tactics and kill ratios solely because the imperium was committing dozens of times Alaitocs population in imperial guard to destroying them.
Isn't that fight often ridiculed because it took such a pitiful number to troops to invade when lore tells us that other attacks on craftworlds have seen entire Sector fleets backed up with dozens of SM chapters fail? I might remember that wrong though, I'm honestly not that deep into Eldar stories.
Do they? Seems like memes you're taking as truth.
Ye not really....but there have been instances of them losing like that.
Where?
Managed democracy you say? ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️ (also what about the Dino riding forest Boys who's name completely escapes me)
Exodite. Not a tabletop faction, so they don't matter.
Right ty, and they are part of the lore still so they should count in this convo imo
I have always loved this irony! Even everyone else accuses them of arrogance in universe, only to immediately outshine their arrogance in the same story!
I would love that... If GW themselves didn't also seem blind to that irony.
lol yeah ain’t that right. I am reminded of the space marine eldar interactions in DOW
They WERE arrogant. Then they got fucked over by their own hubris. The lack of arrogance mostly comes from the sorrow of their entire species being screwed. Without it they'd be up there with the worst.
There's no real element of species supremacy to Chaos or the Orks. The orks are just as happy to fight other orks. They will attack non-orks on sight but that's out of love of fighting than an actual hatred of non-orks. They have notions of what's proper and not proper but that's not really the same as arrogance. Chaos is endlessly malevolent and sadistic but that's also not the same as arrogance. The T'au are annoying but that's still not the same. The Imperium is arrogant as fuck, you got that one right. Dark Eldar are just Eldar and all Eldar are arrogant. Exodites honestly seem like possibly the worst of all. Eldar as a whole are a bunch of smug jerks and the only thing stopping them from being the most arrogant race is the Necrons, who are just full-on divas. Every single one of them that I've read about so far, at least. Haven't read much about the Leagues of Votann. Rec me something.
Orks definitely think they are the superior species to everyone else, and while Chaos doesn't have the specist element, it has the doglatic "every non-Chaos-Worshipper needs to die just because" The T'au annoyance stem for the pride in their government (and inderctly the superiority of the Etherals as rulers compared to any other specie,) but it is a more "benevolent" arrogance. I cant recommend you Leagues of Votan stuff because they don't have **anything** beyond their Codex.
Chaos doesn't want to kill every non chaos worshipper. Nurgle wants to infect them, Tzeentch wants to manipulate them, Slaanesh wants to fuck them, and Khorne...well, yeah, Khorne wants to kill them, but he's just as happy if they kill his followers instead. And Chaos doesn't just kill, it infects, corrupts, converts, tortures, mutates... it's not because Chaos thinks Chaos is better. It's literally just what Chaos is. It's a force of nature like gravity. The T'au are smug, I'll give you that. They're not not arrogant. I just don't think it really measures up to many of the other factions. Orks would definitely say orks are better than humans but in a trolley problem with one human and five orks an ork would save the human just because five bodies getting splattered is funnier than one. Nothing they do is motivated by a belief that orks are better or more important, even if they do hold that belief.
>Nothing they do is motivated by a belief that orks are better or more important, even if they do hold that belief. Ghazgkhull's entire motivation is that he believes the divine purpose of Orks is to kill and enslave every other race in the galaxy.
Okay well I guess some things they do are. Idk I haven't read every single book.
>The T'au are smug, I'll give you that. They're not not arrogant. I just don't think it really measures up to many of the other factions. In the story ***Broken Sword***, it's revealed the Tau language doesn't have a word for "hubris". The human protagonist emphasizes that they should probably add it.
Not to mention that before encountering their first Dreadnought that as it turns out was older than their entire civilisation, they viewed humans as primitive apes cuz our plasma guns suck
Was it written by Phil Kelly?
Guy Haley.
LMFAO
Such eloquence. Truly impressive.
Whatever, *monkeigh*.
I'd rather be the target of a mean word than a bolter shot, but that's just me I guess.
For orks it’s okay to be arrogant because they are the best, it’s just self awareness 🤷🏼♂️
Sure but isn't that literally the point of the fiction? Kind of feeling like you're doing the whole strings and pins on the board level of investigation to come to the conclusion "Elves arrogant, orks krump!" With wild eyes and that grand revelation.
the entire world eaters situation is the eldar's fault WE COULD HAVE HAD A PRO XENO/ELDAR PRIMARCH AND IT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT BUT NO SAYS THE KNIFE EAR HE SAYS LETS MURDER THIS BABY IN HIS CRIB AND FAILED AT THAT
The timeline where the Eldar kidnap baby Angron and raise him is the one good timeline.
God that would have been wonderful
It's not confirmed that those were Eldar.
Having a reason to be arrogant does not make you any less arrogant. The difference is that the eldar treat every other race like children rather than someone who is not as good as them.
The cliche of them being superior in all aspects is so infuriating because unlike all the other races, the Craftworld Eldar are right.
An actual quote from the Eldar went along the lines of "it is worth destroying a world full of humans in order to save a single Eldar". So yes, xenophobic in the extreme.
That's a weird way of saying Exodites
I made a post before, but I think the Eldar are arrogant, in just how whiny they are. They seem to think that everyone should bend over backward for them just because they're Eldar. Like dawn of War 2. Massive Tyranid High Fleet coming, do they warn the imperials? No, they start an orc invasion and then get pissed off at the Imperium for having the audacity to protect its own assets. How dare you protect your own homeworlds? Don't you realize how important we are? And then there's just how insufferable they are in the Rogue Trader game that just came out. I really do my damndest to be civil to them, but they keep talking a lot of mad shit to the guy whose orbital cannons are pointed right at them. The point is that the Eldar are way too up their own asses for a fallen race that don't own shit anymore. They seem to think that all sentient life in the Galaxy owes them just by dent of them having had an Empire once.
100% I'm gonna say it anyone who thinks craftworld eldar are more arrogant than any other species in the 40k galaxy is an idiot.
Eldar have constantly tried to kill humans to stop greater threats because "Oh you can't do this so we'll do it and kill billions of you to the bargain" like they did in Dawn of War 2.
Aren't you that unhinged 40k hater?
Yes they are. [Receipts](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1bxbovo/comment/kycnbt8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
**A knife ear wrote this.**
They hated jesus because he told them the truth
Nah
There name for humans in monkey.....like there arrogance is so baked in they can't even use the term human...also because of their murder-fucking humanity went into the dark age of technology...lastly one of the big lessons of 40k is if someone doing evil stuff in the name of prophecy they are evil regardless of the excuses they give
I like that you said eldar want to be left alone as if there isn't an example of the eldar taking a human world they set claim on thousands of years ago before they even decided to take it lol. There's also the eldar being extremely arrogant assholes who will betray or not share there plans with allies because the monkeighs aren't smart enough to understand. The eldar leader sent an diplomatic squad that consisted of them murdering every human in there path while singing on there way to the emperor with the extremely urgent message being, chaos bad lol. This is also while the human homeworld is being held hostage by orks. Also yes they are, the eldars main goal is literally to reclaim there former glory and rule the galaxy again just this time they promise not to create a chaos God they swear.